Wednesday, May 27, 2009

"Seeking escape and recuperation in an absence of discipline"

Hayek's The Road to Serfdom meditates on the relation between individual liberty and government authority. Hayek believed that empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to utopia, but to fascism. Written in 1944, with updated prefaces in 1956, 1976, and a 50th anniversary edition which carried an introduction by Milton Friedman, it actually began as a memo to the London School of Economics written by Hayek in the early 1930s, disputing the then-popular claim that fascism represented the dying gasp of a failed capitalist system.

Hayek explained in the foreword to the 1956 American paperback edition that he wrote the book originally as a warning to the "socialist intelligencia of England." But in 1934 America under FDR established the National Planning Board, which "devoted a good deal of attention to the example of planning provided by these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan." Ten years later we had of course learned to refer to these same countries as "totalitarian," had fought a long war with three of them, and were soon to start a "cold war" with the fourth.

Hayek showed how "fascism and communism are merely variants of the same totalitarianism which central control of all economic activity tends to produce." He thought "the century of socialism probably came to an end around 1948." Wrong! Still, he warned against complacency: "There is some danger that our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society."

Hayek also warned that "a conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege." The essence of the classical liberal position, however, "is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others."

Hayek writes that "the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people." He quotes from the results of a sociological survey conducted in 1945 in England: "The young people are obliged to stomach so much external and, as it seems to them, meaningless control, that they seek escape and recuperation in an absence of disciplne as complete as they can make it."

Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America with great foresight about the psychological effects we are now experiencing in our modern welfare state: "The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided. Such a power does not destroy, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people."

Do the people of America today have a "naive trust in the good intentions of the holders of totalitarian power?" If so, how can the grave dangers of totalitarianism be prevented?

2 comments:

Webutante said...

We can only hope for enough of a jolt in this country to bring people to their senses about the false hope and unfulfillable promises of the "all-knowing" totalitarian state. Remember when frogs are boiled in hot water but the temperature is only turned up by degrees they don't ever know what's coming.

Good post from memoriable books, Bob.

Terri Wagner said...

Even Rush admitted yesterday there seems to be no leader to gather around in the Republican party. I think the parties as constituted today are over, how long before a third party asserts itself?